Language Poster. Two years of research, design, and consultation with Stanford University linguists went into the production of this beautiful chart. Colorful and filled with fascinating and useful information. With it you can trace the history of the English language, find out how Tiwi relates to Pitjantjatjara, or discover the current top 12 languages of the world. Size of both the poster stock and paper/folded versions is approx 21'' x 33''. Available in heavy duty poster stock rolled in a tube $199.95. Or folded paper poster saddle stitched into a 12-page teacher's supplement with articles and activities for the classroom or home. $39.95

"...Both the archaeological record (in terms of bones and artifacts) and human genes (in terms of gene frequencies and mitochondrial DNA) indicate that all modern humans share a recent common ancestry in Africa. What is surprising, and difficult to explain, is that people who look just like us - modern humans - first appear in the archaeological record one hundred thousand years ago. But these people did not behave like us; they are indistinguishable from Neanderthals in both their toolkit and their behavior. It was only around fifty thousand years ago that - quite suddenly - both toolkits and behavior started to change with amazing rapidity. Toolkits that had remained unchanged over hundreds of thousands of years began to change with the rapidity of tennis-shoe styles today. And styles that had been uniform over huge geographical distances began to differentiate in neighboring villages.......What advantage could have allowed a small African population to leave Africa fairly recently and, in a short time, occupy the entire world and replace all previous human inhabitants? A growing number of scholars - linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists - believe that it was the appearance of fully modern human language around fifty thousand years ago that bestowed this enormous selective advantage on a small African population.... ...The invention of modern human language fifty thousand years ago led to the explosive expansion of modern humans around the globe. And even today traces of this sudden expansion persist in languages around the world. ..."